[Banshee-List] Moving Cubano to BCE and thoughts about the future of Banshee

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>]

Cubano is one of the features that got us a lot of good press a while ago, but it has since vanished from sight. I think now that the BCE is off to such a successful start it might be a good time to move that ambitious project to BCE in the hopes of gaining it some new life and renewed excitement.

As 1.6 is now so late in development and having so many new features to test, polish and perfect it would be to much to aim for Cubano to also make it. But what we could do was to aim to have it in an early testable state say 2-4 weeks after 1.6.0 goes out. 

At the same time I think we should think about how we present the power that actively gives users in the form of choice. The Banshee they know only has one frontend displayed but offers so much more. What if we could somehow adapt the System->Preferences->Prefered Applications (gnome-default-applications-properties) to display the choices in an easy to understand fashion e.g.

(Banshee) Full media experience   <- current default Hyena

(Banshee) Minimal yet sleek <- Muinshee

(Banshee) Mini mode <- Minimode

Then have the menu entry obey this choice. I don't know if this is easy or even possible. Doing this would help us get easy user testing done on these additional extension which is much needed but we give the user more obvious choice in a meaningful way. It will also help distributions perhaps better be able to configure banshee for a preconfigured intended deployment such as a Moblin (soon to be MeeGo) spin which many projects now boast.

Now the aim I think should be to commit to adding

(Banshee) Modern and spicy <- Cubano

to the list of features in 1.8 (or which ever the stable release after 1.6 will be). If we follow the GNOME schedule it would even give us a date we can say this will be landing. 

I believe this would help bring Banshee to the emerging Linux on Netbook deployments. Canonicals and others have deals going in this area and are already postively influenced to switch to Banshee as their default media player. This gives them and others, and thus users, potentially many more users, easier access to the awesomeness that is Banshee.

It would also bring more attention to the advantages in our design, bring attention to the BCE and the work it does. Making that work available to more users.

David